The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Use of automated outbound telephone calling systems is quite common. Besides being used for marketing purposes, such systems can also be used by doctor offices or clinics to contact patients to confirm or change appointments, by schools to inform students of schedule changes, by charities to obtain contributions, and governmental agencies to provide notification or other information, to name just a few other applications.
In many instances, it may be necessary or helpful to automatically ascertain whether the recipient of the telephone call is an actual person or an answering machine. Depending on whether an actual person has answered or an answering machine is in use, different actions may be taken by the outbound telephone calling system. However, this task, call analysis, is difficult and currently inaccurate.
Call analysis is commonly performed at the hardware switch level. Analysis is implemented by using a short interval when the recipient initially picks up the call and before the call is connected to the telephony application. During this interval, when the recipient begins to speak, the system will process the received audible signals as to, for example, energy content, strength or other signal parameters of the audible signals, in order to make a determination as to whether the recipient is an actual person or answering machine. It is important to understand that the telephony application does not even know the call has been picked up at this step, and therefore, has not delivered any initial prompts. Thus, on the other end of the line, although the recipient has answered the call and given a greeting such as “Hello”, the recipient only hears silence in return as the system is performing call analysis. In many instances, the recipient will then simply hang up.